In kicking off the Macworld Expo
keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled
a new Macintosh web browser namedSafari. Jobssaid the browser was
"based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved
performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster",
JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons
to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform).
The KDE connection: "[f]or its Web page
rendering engine, Safari draws on software from the Konqueror open source
project. Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open
source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive."
The good news for Konqueror: Apple, which said that it will be
"a good open source citizen [and] share[] its enhancements with
the Konqueror open source community", has today sent all
changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.
Congratulations to the KHTML developers for this recognition of
their outstanding efforts. Update @22:34: Dirk Mueller hasposted
an interesting mail from the Safari engineering manager as well
as his response. Hats off to collaboration!

And here i thought Apple Sucked, just when they do something that makes me mad they turn around and use my favorite browser code in Safari, never thought i would say this but kudos to Apple. KDE guys bust out the champagne you guys deserve this recognition, your product was always superior to GNOME and I have been saying it for years.

We can be trolls on our own lists, the only trolls are GNOME users who come in here and try to bring down the achievements of the KDE group. I wonder how many flame letters Apple has got tho from the Mozilla developers for choosing Konqueror as its standard for its new browser, I can see it now. In retaliation for Apple choosing KHTML and KJS Mozilla will no longer be developing a port of its browser for OS X.

As for the desktop wars, KDE hyas already beaten GNOME on ease of use, GNOME 2 still has some quirks i dont like but hey keep trying maybe you guys will eventually get it right.

>> the only trolls are GNOME users who come in here and try to bring down the achievements of the KDE group

Have you ever heard of the word 'generalization'?

I sad 'many KDE users are still the same trolls as they used to be' while you're saying that _all_ Gnome users are trolls...

That's quite a difference.

And I'm definitely not browsing this site to bring down the achievements of the KDE group, I've got better things to do.
Unfortunately the trolls (both the Gnome/KDE ones) don't seem to. :|

I wonder why they're doing it actually.
Do they expect that Gnome users will use KDE instead because they're saying it's better?
(I'm not going to argue about which DE is better btw, everyone has their own choice)

I actually proposed something like this a few months back and there was some discussion over it. We did this before for gtkhtml (it was a port of the original khtml code used in KDE 1.x). But in the end, it was felt that it did not offer compelling advantages over Gecko, which is improving in terms of speed and footprint all the time.

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Hey, is there any reason KHTML couldn't be made to work for Gnome, the way Galeon brings Mozilla to Gnome?

I don't know who would work on such a politically loaded project, but if the engine is better, why not use it? If it can be ported to Aqua and OS X it can surely be ported to Gnome...
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Hey, KDE 3.1 is feature frozen since quite a few weeks (moths?) and currently at RC level. These changes will go into 3.2. (3.1.x is for translation, serious bug and security fixes only, as 3.0.x was.)

Some changes have already been committed to HEAD (what will be 3.2) and bugfixes are being backported to KDE_3_1_BRANCH to appear in 3.1.1. Since few of these improvements are grave bugs, I doubt 3.1 will be delayed, only showstoppers can do so now. No indication of a delay on the lists either.

What they need to do is seperate the konqueror code from the base packages so we as developers can have a better structure, one of the problems I have now is that if i make any changes to theKonqueror code and recompile, something in KDE crashes It takes me forever to debug and find the problem., who knows maybe Apple will release Safari for Linux. I know im pushing the limits and probably a little bit of wishful thinking.

Or not. Apple, as much as I don't care for their stuff personally, does understand one vital concept that seems to get lost in the world of Linux. People flock to apps, not OS's. I've been hearing from just too many sources a very similar theme keep coming up. What can you run under Linux that you can't run under Windows? More specifically, what desktop style app would drive me away from Windows to Linux?

Ask a Mac user a similar question, and they'll come back with a stack of responses concerning a number of fairly recent Apple software offerings. They might even point out a few 3rd party apps that are Mac only. These are far more compelling reasons to use a Mac than anything that OSX itself brings to the table.

What seems to be happening far too often is that the really cool stuff developed for Linux gets itself a Windows port going. Yes, that app now enjoys a wider audience, but in so doing actually hurts the long term acceptance of a Unix desktop. As closed up as it sounds, I believe that some of the cooler applications out there need to code so specifically for a Unix environment that porting to Windows is made far more difficult.

Personally, the KDE desktop itself is a compelling reason to stay right where I'm at with FreeBSD. KMail jumps way up there as a killer app for me, as it's arguably the best mail client I've used to date. As compelling as these are for me, they aren't going to force a shift by themselves. These things are what keeps the user that has moved over.

Over this next year, the entirety of the Free software community needs to be able to answer the question of what you can do here that you can't do elsewhere. Arguments over price, security, and even stability just don't play with the desktop user like they do with the server administrator.

On the plus side though, I truly believe that this is the year where Microsoft will begin to feel the impact of KDE coming strong into their desktop market space. You think they're paranoid about the data center? Just wait until the end users start shifting! I can hardly wait for the priceless over-the-top reactions to come.

Safari is so fast on Jaguar, I may never get broadband! (Except that it's absolutely necessary for quality streaming A/V stuff)... I live in an apartment in South Dakota, and there are not many broadband options here I would want to consider. So pending further developments, it's nice to have Safari on my iMac - at least for loading web pages at nearly breakneck speed.

I don't think the importance of this can be underestimated. There was a point a year or two ago where it really looked like we were entering an era where web design was based on IE and IE only. From there it's only a hop, skip and a jump away from Microsoft eliminating the viability of Linux desktop. Only the most fanatical of the Linux faithful could stick with a platorm whose browsers can longer render the latest pages.

But with the recent success of Mozilla and now millions of Mac heads about to switch to a non-IE browser, the balance will shift back to standards-based web design.

Web developers in my office are already downloading and testing, finding out what bugs to look out for (not many, so far) and getting ready for including Safari in the QA process. Well, okay, so at least *I* am ;). But seriously, we're moving out of the DOM1 world into DOM2, and khtml/Safari are great.

And I have to say, that the ChangeLog from Apple was very helpful in getting insight into how the browser has been put together.

Too bad that these efforts were not coordinated from the beginning, because right now, the changes in safari-khtml look very massive (and impressive!), so basically this is a fork. I hope that the fork will be closed soon, though, maybe in time for KDE-3.2?

Congratulations to the great KDE developers, who beat Mozilla. We KDE users knew it all the time :-)

well they wanted it to be secret and openly working together with the KHTML-team would've forced them to reveal themselves and open up a wormcan of whining for it to be released before they even got started. This is the way companies has to work on Opensource implementations when they start out..

> Too bad that these efforts were not coordinated from the beginning, because right now,

This was because Safari was a secret* project. Jobs announces these "secret" projects every year at Macworld.

* secret as in rumors had been flooding the mac news sites that apple was working on a browser.. everyone expected it to be a Chimera-like browser, especially after Apple hired it's creator.

> Congratulations to the great KDE developers, who beat Mozilla.

It hasn't exactly "beaten" Mozilla, as khtml still has a long ways in the CSS department and other technologies (XHTML) to go to be on the level of Gecko. Of course, Apple's development efforts should go a long way to briding the gap (especially in CSS).